Etel Adnan

The two untitled paintings by Etel Adnan (b. 1925, Beirut – d. 2021, Paris) from 2010 belong to a series of geometric abstractions that the artist has been making since the late 1950s. Working on a flat surface, Adnan uses a palette knife to add paint directly onto loose pieces of canvas, resulting in tessellated blocks of pure colour. Reminiscent of landscapes, in which circles stand for the sun and lines divide sea and sky, these paintings draw on places that Adnan has lived in or visited and reflect the deep respect for nature that is reflected in the artist's work: 'My painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape.' This joy is epitomised by the artist's vivid and distinctive colour palette, the 'brightness' of which was inspired by Adnan's time working and living in California at the beginning of her artistic career.

Combining watercolour marks, abstract hieroglyph-like symbols and a poem in English, the untitled leporello from 1965 is an early example of Etel Adnan's use of leporellos, an accordion-style book format that originated on the Asian continent. Best known as a poet and novelist until the mid-2000s, the artist saw this format as a way to combine the mediums of painting and writing, as well as a means to expand the physical parameters of her work. Adnan is quoted as saying, 'I like the flow, the apparent lack of boundaries, the river image of these long unfolding papers.' Language is a frequent concern of the polyglot artist, who grew up speaking Turkish and Greek at home, French at school and Arabic 'on the streets'. Initially using leporellos to learn Arabic poems that Adnan copied by hand, the artist later began to include original texts in English. Created in 1965 at the height of the Vietnam War, the poetry featured in these pages ends with the line 'America at war' and is thought to have been written in response to this conflict, which lasted from 1955 to 1975.